Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

ckhet: I have no idea what I’m doing

I found a game called ckhet, which is supposedly patterned after a boardgame called Khet, but I haven’t a clue how to make it work.

I understand that the red line is a laser and the idea is to control its reflection by turning pieces, but I’ve never played the boardgame and this particular version is rather tight-lipped.

I can tell you that you’ll need to start ckhet once in a terminal as a “server,” and connect through another with ckhet localhost for a two-player game. For a single-player game against the AI, you need to give the “server” a robot as a flag; check the -h list for how to do that.

Once the game is running, there seem to be only two or three controls: space or Enter to select a piece, and the bracket keys to rotate it once left or right. What the goal is beyond that, or how to win the game … I’m not sure. No man page that I could find, and the best source of information was in the README or on the Wikipedia page for the boardgame.😦

It’s a good looking game and seems to have a strong idea of how to conduct itself, but for now, I’m just a little clueless on how to play the game at all.